Notes to John provides many glimpses behind the stoic front of Joan Didion, revealing her bout with cancer, the fact that as a young woman she was physically abused by a man she loved, and her daughter’s repeated hospitalizations and treatment for alcoholism. But the book doesn’t answer the central question many of the author’s acolytes have about it: Who thought it was a good idea—and I mean the term “good” in multiple senses: ethically, aesthetically, and commercially—to publish the private woman’s notes to her husband detailing her therapy sessions, and why?

Except for the final two entries, the notes were found in Didion’s desk after her death in 2022. Written between December 29, 1999, and January 9, 2003, and addressed to John Gregory Dunne, they provide summaries of her sessions with the psychiatrist Roger MacKinnon, and one joint session with her daughter, Quintana (aka Q), and Quintana’s therapist.

Although she is famous for having published her psychiatric evaluations from 1968 in the title essay of her collection The White Album, Didion was not someone who regularly underwent therapy. These sessions were requested by Quintana, who was concerned about her mother’s anxiety. In an unusual arrangement, Q’s psychiatrist worked in tandem with MacKinnon, though mother and child only attended therapy together once, apparently: That session is summarized in the last entry in the book. It and the previous entry—a joint session between John and Joan—were found on Didion’s computer.

The commercial exploitation of family trauma left me feeling deeply uncomfortable and even ashamed, like I was caught holding a ticket stub for the rubbernecking line at a train crash.

Didion wrote these notes to her spouse apparently so he could be kept informed of what are generally considered private conversations between patient and doctor, and their very existence demonstrates the intensity of the couple’s marital bond. The entries are extremely personal and reveal confidential information not just about Joan, but about her family, particularly her daughter, who died less than two years after the final entry. Didion kept them, as she did many, many documents, presumably because she knew they would be of historical interest to scholars, biographers, and, yes, fans. Indeed, after being embargoed until the publication of this book (lest any penny be lost!), these notes are now available for public scrutiny in the New York Public Library’s special collections room (with an appointment). Joan could have tossed them out. She didn’t.

But that doesn’t mean the recipient of the National Humanities Medal intended to have these intimate documents packaged, published, and sold for $32. From the moment the book was announced, many commentators have questioned the morality of her estate and publisher profiting off such intensely private and essentially medical documents. Granted, all of the main subjects—Joan, John, their parents, Q, Joan’s brother, the psychiatrists—are deceased. The writer’s closest surviving relatives—her brother’s children—are the heirs to her estate and obviously signed off on the book.

As a scholar of Didion, I am the perfect audience for Notes to John, and I bought it immediately. And yet the commercial exploitation of family trauma left me feeling deeply uncomfortable and even ashamed, like I was caught holding a ticket stub for the rubbernecking line at a train crash.

Don’t get me wrong; for the world’s many Didionphiles, Notes offers a fascinating study in the master memoirist’s ability to turn memory into literature. Ever the wry observer of modern life, Didion could fashion arch vignettes out of therapy summations. She mocks her own careful emotional distance. “Working was what I did instead of engaging,” she writes. “Working, as you once pointed out, was the way I had found to not be there emotionally.”But more surprisingly, the famously tight-lipped journalist opens up, slowly but surely, under the doctor’s questioning. Her transcripts of their conversations can read like early drafts of movie dialogue between two erudite thinkers, untangling the convoluted knots of difficult family histories. At one point, they’re discussing John McCain’s biography.

“Certain kinds of American families discourage open expression,” he said. “He grew up in one of them, I did too, you did too. You have trouble talking to people one on one. You weren’t brought up to do that.”

I started to cry.

“Some people who were brought up this way are sufficiently sensitive that they can’t talk to other people without crying,” he said.

“As you can see,” I said.

Until the prose becomes an echo chamber. Joan tells John what she told Dr. MacKinnon that Quintana said to John, as John told Joan. Page after page repeats this pattern of “she said he said she said he said” until it confuses and exhausts.

The form gets tired even when the content remains deep. Notes offers fascinating insight into the terrible ordeal in which this storied family found themselves at the start of this century. The parents were dealing with the mental and physical loss that comes with aging; Joan was 65 at the start of the sessions and talks about her past cancer, her failing memory, and her fragility after a fall. John died from his heart condition less than a year after the final entry. Quintana was drinking herself into oblivion. Her parents repeatedly try to keep her alive, to keep her from committing suicide in particular. But 11 months after the last entry, Quintana became mortally ill. After a series of hospitalizations, she died of pancreatitis in 2005. And just like that, Joan was alone.

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Notes reveals the myriad ways in which Didion failed to fully reckon with Q’s mental health issues in her books. Despite Q’s extensive stints in rehab, detox, AA, therapy, etc., as detailed in these notes, Didion remained in denial about her daughter’s addiction. In Blue Nights, she brushes off Quintana’s alcoholism. After all, to admit her daughter’s drinking problem, she might have had to admit her own, and her husband’s.

This may be the most serious issue with the publication of this book: It confirms that Didion was not entirely honest with us. One of the reasons so many readers revere her as the master of the first-person essay is because we believe she was not afraid to tell us even the most uncomfortable of truths. Notes confirms she was hiding something from us, even if it was because she had trouble confessing it to herself. And lying damages Didion’s brand.

That said, with its couchside peek at the many traumas she kept hidden, Notes firmly establishes Didion as the queen of stoicism. She may have opened the door for first-person narratives to come, but for her the personal voice was not an occasion for confession but a tool to crack open the door to male-dominated journalism. Perhaps she wrote because she wasn’t good at speaking without crying. And true to her proud pioneer heritage, she valued strength over vulnerability.